Youper is a self-care, selfhelp tool that is designed to allow users to take control of their emotional health and communicate more effectively with mental-health-care providers. It was created to help you become the best possible version of yourself.

Youper is a confidential app — created by psychiatrist Jose Hamilton Vargas, designer and software engineer Diego Dotta and computer scientist Thiago Marafon — designed to be a personal assistant to help users monitor and improve their emotional health.

The app allows users to monitor their emotional state by providing a notification at a certain time each day as a reminder to track your mood throughout the day. When describing emotional symptoms in a conversation in the app, suggestions are provided as methods to help ease stress or anxiety.

Some methods offered through Youper are meditation and gratitude exercises. Symptom monitoring is available for general mood and any specific mental-health diagnosis you may have. With multiple diagnoses, there are multiple monitoring tools that ask questions specific to your condition.

It can be overwhelming while in treatment with mental-health professionals to recall what sort of symptoms you’ve had over the past couple of weeks. Maybe, the last few days were okay, but the week before was very stressful, and the week before that was even worse — but who can remember their symptoms over a period of weeks?

Youper can be used as a log to monitor your symptoms and can be useful in determining if there are certain stressors or triggers that cause you more anxiety or distress. Having a reminder from the app to describe how you were feeling on each given day can make it much easier to describe your state of mind as it has — potentially — changed since last seeing your healthcare provider.

Youper was created to present new ways of helping us with the pursuit of happiness — it uses artificial intelligence to help us understand the functioning of the human mind and support us to live happier lives.

Youper is personalized to develop individualized treatments for specific conditions. The app incorporates a variety of methods such as cognitive behavioural therapy, mindfulness and meditation, and acceptance and commitment therapy to assist users in overcoming negative affective states.

Everyone wants to be able to live a happier life, but there are so many factors that contribute to a person’s happiness. General happiness is affected by social relationships, temperament and adaptation, socio-economic status, society and culture, and thinking styles — to name a few.

The website states that having a conversation with Youper has been shown to improve individuals mood for over 80 per cent of users. Youper analyzes the moodrelated symptoms you describe to determine changes in your daily symptoms.

Using the app has helped me to see what factors in my life have been causing me the greatest amount of stress. It has helped me to develop different perspectives on situations as well as explore a variety of coping mechanisms and tools to improve my well-being.

By using Youper, I have increased my productivity and have felt a general improvement in my mood. The app has helped me to remain mindful of my feelings throughout the day and within various situations, which has helped me handle stressors more effectively.

Youper is not designed to replace medical consultation or therapy and does not provide diagnosis or medical or professional care — but it can be a useful tool to monitor symptoms and to help you have more informed conversations with medical professionals.

Youper can help people improve their mood and challenge negative thinking. The app uses artificial intelligence to gain information about your preferences and behaviours to best help you improve your daily functioning.

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Shawna Langer

Graphic: Shawna Langer